By ANTHONY DePALMA,

Published: April 29, 1992

FAIRFIELD, Iowa—
The plains are misty with chill as first light slips over the Patanjali Golden Dome of Pure Knowledge. A man in a hooded sweatshirt shakes a bell to call in meditators before the doors close. A new day in the search for Heaven on Earth has begun here on the campus of Maharishi International University, 45 miles west of the Mississippi River.

At a time when the real world, with all its messy disputes, increasingly intrudes on the isolation of college campuses, here is an accredited university with grant-winning faculty members and competitive students who mix daily transcendental meditation in the dome with serious academic studies, striving to create their own new world.

But, alas, controversy clouds even utopia.

As it gains credibility, with researchers winning Government grants, the 20-year-old university is still suspect because it is so closely tied to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the pixieish Indian seer who in the 1960's introduced the Beatles and thousands of alienated young people to transcendental meditation, in which initiates repeat a secret word, or mantra, to reach what they say is a higher state of consciousness.

Everyone at the university -- all students, all faculty, all administrators -- meditates, and the Maharishi's teachings are woven into mathematics, physics and every subject taught there, much the way Christian or Jewish ideas become a part of teaching at colleges with strong religious affiliations.

Maharishi University claims it is not a religious institution. But people who have left the movement call transcendental meditation a cult, and the university its training ground.

"Students there are getting a medieval education and a medieval view of what life is," said Curtis Mailloux, class of 1979, and a former director of the Transcendental Meditation Center in Washington, D.C., until he left the movement in 1989. Now involved in "deprogramming" former meditators, he called the Fairfield campus a "coercive environment" with a "propensity for fraudulent research."

Officials responsible for the university's accreditation, aware of such accusations, say they have been aggressive in checking Marahishi International's academic freedom.

"Every move the university's made has been monitored," said Steven D. Crow, deputy director of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, the organization that grants accreditation to colleges in the Midwest and has found Maharishi University's faculty, library, classroom space and academic mission "appropriate" since 1980.

The accreditation itself has been questioned. "It's a crying shame," said John W. Patterson, a professor of material science and mechanical engineering at Iowa State University. The North Central Association, he said, "does nothing more than to lend credibility to these crackpots."

University officials say 1.5 million people have gone through the initiation ceremony for transcendental meditation. Many longtime practitioners claim they have learned the secret of yogic flying, a kind of levitation that on videotape looks like cross-legged hopping.

The university offers undergraduate majors in 14 traditional subjects, including art, biology and government, and Ph.D.s in four: business management, physics, physiology and psychology. It is the only university in the country to offer Ph.D. degrees in the Neuroscience of Human Consciousness and in the Science of Creative Intelligence, which is the Maharishi's unified theory of life. They Meditate, of Course

The university's 800 students, from 71 countries, pay about $10,000 a year in tuition and board, and attend class six days a week, studying one subject at a time in monthlong blocks.

And, of course, they meditate. Twice a day, for credit, in the Patanjali Dome for men and another just like it for women. And every course they take, from physics to business management, is somehow related to the Maharishi's theory that a unified field of consciousness connects everything to everything else.

"My idea was to provide a basis to all knowledge," Maharishi said in a telephone interview from a transcendental meditation headquarters in Vlodrop, the Netherlands. "The campus, even though not large, has created an ideal atmosphere of harmony and peace." Making a Choice, Paying the Price

A soft mechanical hum -- white noise -- fills Patanjali Dome. John B. Fagan is one of about 300 men sitting cross-legged on foam cushions that cover the floor. He has draped a white sheet over his shoulders. His eyes are closed, his face serene.

But then, that same look -- blissful, it might be called -- is always with Dr. Fagan. He is Maharishi University's star researcher, chairman of the chemistry department, a Ph.D. from Cornell University who left a promising post at the National Institutes of Health in Washington.

He knew there would be a price to pay. Dr. Fagan, who has been meditating since 1968, had been doing research on the predisposition of certain genes to cancer. He wanted to continue the work in Fairfield, but he did not expect Government support right away. He was right. His grant applications were rejected three times.

"On site visits," Dr. Fagan said, "the guys from N.I.H. would say, 'You seem to have the facilities, but what is this M.I.U. place? Is it some kind of cult? A religion?' "

Dr. Fagan said he realized that the only way to convince the investigators that the university was capable of doing good science was to do it. Friends of the university provided enough money, he said, to "take out a grub stake" and prove that uncompromised science was possible. In 1986, the National Cancer Institute awarded him a $700,000 grant to continue his genetic research. It was renewed in 1988, and last fall the institute gave him a research career development award of $250,000.

Dr. Fagan's research has nothing to do with transcendental meditation, but most of what goes on here does. Administrators defensively pull out study after study to bolster their claims about meditation's ability to help people transcend normal states of consciousness and even increase their I.Q. scores.

But these studies prove either incomplete or slightly off base. Recently the Journal of the American Medical Association has been embarrassed because in 1991 it printed an article about Ayurvedic medicine -- Indian remedies promoted by Maharishi -- that was written by someone with ties to a company that sells oils and ointments used in the practice.

Similarly, in 1988 the Journal of Conflict Resolution, which is edited at Yale University, carried a report by Maharishi University researchers on what is called the Maharishi effect, a belief that people meditating together can end violence and disorder. Mathematically, the argument went, it would take the square root of one percent of the earth's population -- about 7,000 people -- meditating together to vanquish violence.

The Journal's editor, Bruce M. Russett, chairman of the political science department at Yale, expressed his doubts about the article in an unusual written introduction, but published it anyway. Professionals were horrified. In 1990 the Journal carried two more articles on the Maharishi University study, one rejecting its methodology as flawed, the other a defense by the university. Not a Religion, But a Way of Life

Andrew Josephs jumps off his 10-speed and rushes the doors of Patanjali dome but they have already been shut. Out of breath, he reluctantly remounts his bike for the two-mile ride back home.

Mr. Josephs, 36 years old, who runs an insurance company in Fairfield, is typical of the thousands of non-students who have come here so they can meditate in the domes.

"Most of us moved here because we wanted to be close enough to embrace this more," he said, pointing to the dome. "People say it must be a cult, that we worship Maharishi. But I know no one who worships Maharishi."

University administrators insist that transcendental meditation is not a religion, even if portraits of Maharishi identify him as "His Holiness." The old Christian chapel from the days when the Fairfield campus was Parsons College, a private institution, is still open for use, but many of the pews are covered with the blankets students use when they meditate there in the evenings.

If it is not a religion, it is an abiding view of the world its adherents want to create. Most students here are the children of meditators and have themselves meditated since they were 4 years old. "My mom always told me that someday I'd come here," said Nina Honkanen, a 20-year-old sophomore from Republic, Wash.

Miss Honkanen said she had attended a local college, Spokane Falls Community College, for a year but found it too stressful. "I had a roommate who didn't meditate; nobody around meditated," she said. "Sometimes I had to meditate through a party, with people all around. It's like sleep. If you need it, you do it."

Others say they have made meditation and Maharishi's teachings the central focus of their lives. Inga Schader, a 17-year old junior from Auckland, New Zealand, is studying biology as well as creative intelligence to become an ayurvedic doctor.

"Maharishi is not giving us all the answers," she said. "But the one answer he is giving us is that it is all within ourselves." Blessing, of Sorts For the Town

Dorothy Clark has lived in Fairfield since 1977 but she is still not used to "them," as the townspeople call the meditators. "If they're going to the domes, just watch out," said Miss Clark, who works at the Loving Spoonful Cafe on West Broadway. "If there's a stop sign and they're in a hurry, you don't know what they'll do. Some stop; some don't."

Miss Clark can tell the people connected to the university because they wear sandals, drive foreign cars and think nothing of ordering a glass of hot water with their lunch to help digestion, as directed by their ayurvedic doctors.

Mayor Robert L. Rasmussen says the meditators have helped Fairfield. Nearly all the stores downtown are fairly busy. Just a few miles from campus there is a new project consisting of a health spa, a luxury hotel and tract housing. Three of the meditators sit on the town council.

All this is a far cry from the first classes given at Maharishi University back in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1972. Rhoda Orme-Johnson, sipping her hot water and talking in knotty phrases about knowing versus the knower, has been at the university the whole time. A professor of comparative literature and a founding member of the university's faculty, she says she is never embarrassed to stand up at a conference and identify herself as being on the faculty of Maharishi International University.

"We are really thinking in a cosmic sense," she said. "By being here we can create world peace."

But her view of the world may be colored by the world she, and the others, are trying to create. Mr. Mailloux, the high-ranking member of the meditation movement who left in 1989 and is now a mortgage banker in Fairfax, Va., said that when he has filled out job applications, he never admits that he went to Maharishi International University.

"I lie," he said. "and tell them it was M.I.U., Marshall International University. You've heard of it, haven't you?"

Photos: On the campus of Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, students file into the Patanjali Golden Dome of Pure Knowledge; Dr. John B. Fagan, Maharishi University's star researcher and chairman of the chemistry department, with a student in the chemistry lab. Dr. Fagan, who has been meditating since 1968, left a promising position at the National Institutes of Health in Washington to go to Maharishi. (Photographs by David Conklin for The New York Times)